Time to expand a little on my comments about SE needing to hire a healer designer.

[lisaa]

I just think it's not needed. I think healer design is fine and even if it could be better (such as less dps focus) id rather them spend time on other things. Healer is the role that has the biggest dependence on encounters. Healers are like plaster and encounters are like a rough wall that you try to smooth out. The best way to make it more fun is to just have more and interesting battle content, to have more interesting nooks and crannies to fill in

[ThorneDynasty]

same few people:

plenty of people:

this has to be trolling, right? ^^

Claiming to represent the silent majority that is in fact so silent there appears to be no evidence it exists? Maybe this ethereal majority doesn't actually feel super strongly one way or another, they'd probably not be that silent otherwise.

[Semirhage]

(such as less dps focus)

More room for dance emotes on the old hotbar?

[AFuzzyMu11in]

More room for dance emotes on the old hotbar?

More buttons isn’t really the answer. You guys just want to be entertained in my opinion. I still have plenty of fun weaving on sch. 6.0 will legit make every class weave better except astro which is ehh.

[Silver-Strider]

I just think it's not needed. I think healer design is fine and even if it could be better (such as less dps focus) id rather them spend time on other things. Healer is the role that has the biggest dependence on encounters. Healers are like plaster and encounters are like a rough wall that you try to smooth out. The best way to make it more fun is to just have more and interesting battle content, to have more interesting nooks and crannies to fill in

Healer design is crap from start to finish.

Let's look at CNJ. You get told that its based on a foundation of Earth, Wind and Water magic. At level 15, you are told to learn your Water spell, so you go do the quest, and unlock Fluid Aura nothing because EW is removing it. The entire point of this quest is to learn a water spell and you don't learn jack but whatever, moving on. You've realized that you've been getting a lot of healing abilities but they're really expensive and while you have been trying to get better, you ask for some advice and are told to use your Lucid Dreaming on CD to help with your MP. While it has helped, it's still hard to manage, so you look thru your character to see if you've missed something and find the biggest trap in all FFXIV, Freecure. You read it and think, "Oh, I need to use Cure 1 to get a Free Cure 2" and the spiral begins. You start spamming Cure 1 fishing for that low proc of a free Cure 2 because Cure 2 is just too costly for you to manage. Fast forward and you are now level 50. You find this interesting little quest to find the Primal Oden. You've fought Primals before and they've been fairly easy so far, so you go along the quest and get the Duty. You queue up and find that this fight, is not easy. You are spamming your heals as much as you can but Lucid isn't giving you enough MP and people are dying left and right, all while you're using Cure 1 to try and proc Freecure. You have NOTHING in your toolkit to help you heal more effectively or give you back MP so you're just entirely helpless. Same thing with all the other Extreme Primal quests you picked up.

Now, before, WHM used to have other skills. It had Divine Seal, Stoneskin and Protect to give it some help in the past to do its job more effectively. These were all removed because they were deemed unnecessary. The kicker? They added these skills back in the form of Temperance, Divine Benison and, to a lesser extent, Aqua Veil (ironic that our level 15 quest for a Water Spell doesn't yield fruit until level 86). Perfect design choice right there, limit when we can use our old skills until a higher level.

Now, that's just the leveling experience. Let's look more into other forms of content.

In story quests that force you into solo instances. The entire time, you are there, spamming your 1 Nuke spell on the same enemies for however long it takes you to complete these instances. A Regen is often all you need to handle any oncoming damage you're taking during these encounters so you just spam away on your one button the entire time. Every. Single. Instance. You regen, and spam, and regen, and spam and so on and so forth at nauseum because you don't have anything else to do. There isn't a point in healing the NPCs with you because they can heal themselves most of the time and can even heal you too. That really isn't fun.

How about dungeons? Apart from the 1st few times in new dungeons when you're still learning the mechanics of the fights, these really don't offer much in the way of challenge in regards to healing. Sure, there's a handful of dungeons during the leveling experience that can be problematic, such as Bardam's Mettle or Holmester Switch but generally, the experience is fairly lax in regards to most dungeons. If the party is terrible for whatever reason, then you actually get to pull your weight and heal but that's the problem, isn't it? The party has to be bad in order to validate your role. If the party is decent, the amount of healing you need to perform is minimal. I have gone entire dungeons without the need to cast a single GCD heal at all and even in the event of a party member screwing up a mechanic, it's not as though I don't have enough tools to cover for their mistakes.

Then we have raids. These are probably the only bit of content that actually require more than the bare minimum in regards to healers. Learning the fights is when healers actually shine and are probably the most enjoyable time for healer players because we actually need to think about our healing kits more. However, this is not a permanent thing. People get better gear, they get more experienced with the fights and before long, you're right back to where you started. It comes to a point that you decide to challenge yourself to try and solo heal these fights to see if its possible and, lo and behold, the hardest fights currently available can be solo healed. I have no need of the 2nd healer in the party and thus did we make a healer role replaceable and that is what the entire Healer role is in FFXIV, replaceable. We have videos of people clearing Savage and Ultimate tiers without healers at all and each expansion adds more and more utility to other jobs that further makes healers less and less needed.

So tell me, when they remove skills that were helpful to the healer role and repackage them as "New" skills, when the story forces you into fights that are so easy that you don't even have to think about your skills because you only need 2 at most to complete them and when even the hardest content in the game can be solo or even no healed, can you honestly say, Healer Design is fine?

[Liam_Harper]

I also disagree with some of changes that people ask for here, and its painful to see when SQ listens and makes those changes and it hurts the job, such as AST's in EW bringing back old lord and lady and removing divination interaction

I don't think anyone asked for that. People who wanted AST changes seemed divided into 2 camps of "it's fine, dps is useful" and "bring back old AST, make cards utility". No one asked for a 50/50 on dps and an unnecessary heal and the only people who seem happy with it are the handful who just don't understand how the class works or realize they didn't get what they wanted at all.

This nonsense doesn't happen because of player feedback, it happens because there's no heal designer. Same with things like the Thin Air nerf when WHM had a worse mana economy than AST. You can say you don't want a heal designer, but when you bring up bad changes in Endwalker, you actually want one.
A heal designer would play the role inside-out in all content and be able to design classes that were fun for all players based on actual experience instead of theory. Look at dps for example, classes like RDM and DNC are considered beginner friendly and easy to pick up, yet have plenty of depth that rewards good players in harder content. Healers too could have far more depth while retaining that accessibility and ease of learning, but you need a qualified designer to create that. Not me, not yourself, not any of the other random forum posters, not the devs who only have theory and jumbled feedback. You need someone who knows their job.

You can say you'd like more resources on netcode, battle content, housing and glamour, ect, but lets say for example they got rid of their raid encounter designers for better netcode and glamour and raids became 3-4 clunky mechanic easy bosses because the guy who designs overworld mobs was assigned to raids in his spare time to save resources. It would be awful. That's what's happened with healers. They've assigned the plumber to do the car mechanics job.

[lisaa]

That's such a hyperbole. I have small complaints like everyone does because no one's ideal is the same, it doesn't mean I think they need to redesign the job.

And idk why people want more complexity already ffxiv has more buttons than any other game. Like if you look at other games like Overwatch or League or any other RPG you only have a handful of skills. If anything they should be trimming skills.

[Semirhage]

Overwatch and League are entirely different genres. RPGs have more abilities than like, three.

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 is boring. Objectively.

[Sani2341]

Overwatch or League

Pretty sure neither of those is an rpg, let alone an mmorpg.

or any other RPG you only have a handful of skills. If anything they should be trimming skills.

Hm, we must have played very different rpgs then.
back when I played WoW, I had about 24-36 things on keybinds there as well, which is about the same as most jobs in ffxiv, though the later does have a few outliers to lower counts. (granted none of those are healers). And I am pretty sure SWTOR had me use 24-ish keybinds as well.
And while some limit the amount of abilities you can use at a given time, you still have the same amount of abilities to choose from to put in those limited slots, if not more.

And in the end all the button bloat on healers doesn't even matter, because you don't really need all those oGCD Heals. If they wanted they could easily turn half of those into buffs/debuffs/dmg/[insert downtime activity of choice here] buttons and it would still be more than enough heals left to do our job. we might even end up using our GCD heals again when needed.

[AnotherPerson]

I don't think anyone asked for that. People who wanted AST changes seemed divided into 2 camps of "it's fine, dps is useful" and "bring back old AST, make cards utility". No one asked for a 50/50 on dps and an unnecessary heal and the only people who seem happy with it are the handful who just don't understand how the class works or realize they didn't get what they wanted at all. .

People wanted DPS is useful on cards, but others also wanted RNG flavor utility so they had to work with whatever they get (like SB iteration). Thus, you got the Lord and Lady flip switch when they merged both ideas to satisfy both parties. The guaranteed DPS just came into Divination instead, which freed the seals to get its own mechanic (which is a good thing since it meant they removed the fishing aspect for Balance).

Astrodyne... however... was RNG but the whole Astrodyne concept itself is... a bit lackluster to say the least. It's certainly a step in the right direction to break away from having a convoluted mechanic, but the result wasn't as satisfying as it could have been. There's less fishing involved though since you can't guarantee 3 different seals.

Still though, I guess it fits their paradigm of having healer DPS be optional, though I can't say it'll work exactly well for first clears on raids since AST will be heavily dependent on RNG. I guess in that sense, their vision of healers for AST still aligns?

If fights became less scripted, then I would say there would be a place in raid with the Lord/Lady swap. That's a big IF though, because battle design never requires healers to be spamming GCD heals to manage HP these days.